A Discipline of Programming

Rating:
Summary: computer science classic
Review: ---

Coming from no less a person than Dijkstra, this book, though dated takes programming to a different level.

It blesses the discipline of programming with the mathematical formalism and begins to look at it as a piece of mathematics.

I picked this book while doing my CS undergraduate, and made me fall in love with CS, all over again.

It does NOT however talk much about programming techniques or methods! It looks at programs from as formal a view point as possible and builds a framework for constructing 'correct' programs..or more correctly a framework for 'proving the correctness' of a program. It takes you to the point of considering programs as poetry..

Its difficult to contemplate the application of the thoeries developed here into practice, though a lot of it is used in some form or the other, but nonetheless it makes an excellent reading.

I recommend it to anybody seriously interested in computer science .

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but not vital
Review: I found this book interesting - not least because it is a "classic" computing text. It seems like (I can't be more definitive because I have never studied computer science) an introduction to thinking about proving programs correct and reasoning about code.

I wouldn't recommend it to someone learning computing - it's hardly Abelson et al. - but it's a good book to muse over.

Rating:
Summary: The finest book that I own.
Review: I purchased A Discipline Of Programming about fifteen years ago, at the start of my programming career. It remains the most important programming book that I own, and possibly the most important book of any kind. Anyone who aspires to be a programmer should spend many hours reading it. It is impossible not to benefit hugely.

The (unnamed) language invented by Dijkstra, almost as an aside in the early chapters of the book, is the language in which I would most like to write my programs. Some day perhaps I will be able to.

Rating:
Summary: Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there
Review: I really wanted to get my hands on this book and now that i have (via interlibrary loan) i want to warn folks that this is not light reading. I found a majority of this book very boring and all but impenetrable. I like Dijkstra's English prose, but when he embarks on the math I wish he'd state the point of each set of formulae above them. It would have also helped if he stressed practical uses of his insights vis-a-vis an actual programming language. This "just shows how much I know" I'm sure, but I suspect many people will feel similarly. FYI: My background is Bachelor's in C.S. with a C.S. GPA of 3.87/4.0. A depressing indictment of U.S. education, Dijkstra would say :)

Rating:
Summary: Still relevant after all these years
Review: I still have my original copy of this book. It is one of thefew that are not in storage.

Many of the concepts (such as the chapters on arrays and verification) are still fresh. The emphasis on developing programs by stepwise refinement has guided much of my own programming...

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: This is an excellent book in reasoning about programs. It is fairly rigorous and requires a bit of math maturity, and the reader should be warned that formal methods of computer science have evolved quite a bit since 1976. By this I refer to axiomatic program verification and semantics. The key characteristic of this book is that it is built around discussing real world algorithms. This makes the practical consequences of the analysis more evident than in a typical textbook format.

Rating:
Summary: A book about reasoning
Review: This is not only a book about programming, it is also a book about reasoning on programs, and even a book about reasoning. Treating a program as a formal object, the book discussed its meaning, how to reason about it, and even how to derive it. If you are not a hacker or do not want to be one, you will like this book, and highly possiblely you will read it many times.